Part 1: Identifying the advocacy issue

Advocacy begins with the selection of an issue or problem that you as an organisation want to address and change (step 1). It is very important that you are clear and focused about what you want to change and whether advocacy is the right strategy for the change you want to make.

  • Do you want to change policy? Is a policy change needed?
  • Do you want to initiate a change in law? (this could also address the way an existing policy is being implemented)
  • Are you sure the change you’re intending cannot be solved by educating young people/awareness raising?
  • If the answer to one or more of the above questions is yes, then advocacy might be the way to go.
  • If the answers are no and you think you can solve the issue through a programme/project, you can proceed with alternative programme objectives without engaging in advocacy work.

Selecting a good issue requires time. You need to discuss and debate about it with people from different layers within the organisation, but also outside the organisation (for fresh insights) and most importantly, with the people who are affected by the issue.

Your organisation may want to work on numerous advocacy issues, but it is important to be very selective. The RNW Media Advocacy framework states that max 2 advocacy issues should be selected to focus on in addition to the regular campaigning topics of your team. Advocacy efforts may require a lot of (limited) resources (time, human, financial), and in order to succeed, it is better to focus on one issue at a time.

The next section will cover two tools, that can be used to select an issue, together with your team and beneficiaries.

There is a broad general “rule” to consider when selecting an issue:

Your advocacy issue should always be clearly linked to your organisation’s mission, programmatic priorities, and strategic focus areas. If it is not, you will not have the authority you need to address it.

Below you’ll find a tool to select issues to work on.

Issue selection

PROBLEM: Select those that require changes in policy or legislation
BARRIERS: Cultural, economic, lack of knowledge, lack of political unwillingness, lack of policy, of good policy, lack of implementation of policy
ISSUE: Which policy change is needed to remove the barrier
Example: Lack of access to contraceptives.  
Example: Injectable contraceptives can only be distributed at hospitals. à this is an advocacy issuereligious leaders in the community are against contraception à this is not an advocacy issue. This could however be addressed by an awareness raising campaign.
Example: Community health workers are permitted to distribute injectable contraceptives.

This tool can help you and your team to brainstorm about advocacy issues, using the following guidelines:

  1. Be specific: choosing your issues does not mean choosing a broad topic you want to address, for example “sexual education”. You have to think about specific problems and policy related solutions.
  2. In the first column, list the identified problem(s).
  3. In the second column, list what the barriers are to solve the identified problem. This barrier must be related to guidelines, policies, or laws.
  4. What policy change would help remove the barrier? This is the advocacy issue.
    Be as specific as possible regarding the aimed policy change. Should a new policy be created? a harmful policy be removed? or does an existing policy need to be reformed? Or implemented?
  5. After identifying possible issues (max three), the last step is to select the best and final advocacy issue. A good way for doing this is by scoring it along a number of criteria, such as relevance, level of public support, success rate.